Good Morning Everyone. I came to type up a cheerful recap of my birthday, but my internet was not working and in the time it took and with my irritation about having to reboot everything and fiddle with it to get the connection back, I realized that I lost something yesterday that was really important to me and I have to find a way to get it back.
Yesterday people were shot. Some were injured and some lost their lives in an airport in Fort Lauderdale. I know yesterday the count was 5 killed and 8 injured. I know they have arrested a suspect, but that is all I can remember. I was at the office with my “guys” and we were visiting when the youngest -my Work Child- got an alert on his phone of news so I pulled up the Miami Herald and briefly looked at it, then went on about my day, celebrating my birthday. Never mind that another whack job killed people in an airport. This has become REGULAR news, not a national tragedy as it used to be when we would all be stunned and glued to our TV’s.
I am ashamed of myself. This isn’t who I am/was.

….but because I want to tell you this too…I had one of the best meals of my life. My steak was done to perfection. Rare+. which is somewhere between rare and medium rare but takes all the explanation out of it. I had a delicious beet salad, but not quite as good as the one I had with Michelle last summer. Crab toast, that may have been the freshest tasting crab I have ever had. I skipped my garlic mashed potatoes and my haricot vert –which sounds much fancier than green beans– because I wanted to eat all of my steak.
No, I didn’t plug anything into the calorie and nutrition counter on my phone yesterday. While I definitely got enough nutrition I would not want to see the total number of calories consumed.
Now I am off to get dressed to meet Leesee for birthday breakfast.

I see today’s Google doodle pays tribute to the man who developed the worldwide standard time zones, Sir Sandford Fleming, a Scottish-born immigrant to Canada who quietly changed the world: https://www.historicacanada.ca/content/heritage-minutes/sir-sandford-fleming. Incidentally, his name is very well known to me – one of the colleges I attended (I have taken courses in three) bears his name.

At the age of 18 in 1845, Sir Sandford arrived in Canada. He spent his first summer in Canada at the home of a friend in Peterborough – Dr. John Hutchison.
Sir Sandford worked in Peterborough, surveying until 1849 when he became a fully qualified engineer. It was during this time Sir Sandford drew and printed the first map of Peterborough.

No one will see the joke who hasn’t been to Peterborough, Ontario. It has the craziest streets which run at odd angles to one another. It wasn’t Fleming’s fault, since the town was settled on a river and the roads were originally aligned to the river. Being a river, it doesn’t follow a straight line. However, making a map of those roads would have been no mean feat.

Roscuro. Today, the mapping would be easy because of aerial photography. In those days, a real challenge.
My understanding is that time zones were created because of the railroads. Before then, people seldom cared about exactly what time it was.

Chas, faster travel in general needs times zones. Think of the absolute chaos there would be in air travel without time zones, or how impossible it would have been to coordinate something like D-day without a standardized time.

I learned of the shooting yesterday because a good friend used a FB app to notify friends that he was “safe in a violent situation.” At the time, I was on the phone with a work colleague and we commented that 1) it was neat that there is such an app and 2) it’s a shame that such an app is needed.

It’s 22° here this a.m. We have patchy ice and snow dust on our street, but the driveway is totally clear. I did hear a nearby tree pop and break in the night and some transformer noise, but we have not lost power. My brother has about six inches of snow an hour north of us.

Kim, I don’t remember how long I had lived in my house on the West Side of Chicago when I first heard gunshots that were definitely gunshots (sometimes they could be a backfiring car–we had a lot of those in the neighborhood, actually–or firecrackers or something else), and for the first time in my life I knew I was hearing actual gunshots of one person made in the image of God shooting at another. Now, in Chicago guns are also (foolishly) used in celebrations, too, but this wasn’t July 4 or January 1; it was just gunshots. And tears filled my eyes as I rushed to the phone to call 9-1-1. And the tears gushed some more as I realized that within the sound of those gunshots were children used to the sound.

I thought I would never, ever get used to the sound, nor would I want to. The reality? Over my seven to eight years living there, usually I couldn’t actually tell what I was hearing, but I heard them a lot, those maybe-they’regunsots-and-maybe-they’re-firecrackers-or-something-else. (Kids in the hood love firecrackers.) Sometimes I was fairly sure it was a gun–but never did it hit me as hard as it did that first time.

I don’t know that that is getting “hardened” as in ceasing to care. But we were not made to live in adrenaline mode. If you read Amusing Ourselves to Death, it gets into why the whole idea of “news” from outside your local community isn’t helpful. At least not when it is outside “our circle.” It’s important that I know about a murder in my small town–it might have been someone I know, it probably was someone known by someone I know, and if the murderer is still out there, he might pose a threat to me, too. Likewise, it’s “news” if something important happens in the big city I don’t live in. I may or may not need to know about every robbery, but a pattern of muggings and rapes of people in the parking lot at Wal-Mart would be important for me to know about. (No, there hasn’t been such a thing happening.) I don’t need to know about two muggings in Dallas–it doesn’t affect me and there’s not a bit of “action” I can take in response. If people have been shot to death during two church services in Indiana this month, that’s relevant for me to know.

In Chicago it sometimes struck me as sad that murders didn’t necessarily get much press attention. If a drive-by shooting killed a two-year-old or someone gunned down an entire family, that was newsworthy. But some fifteen-year-old punk guns down a rival gang member, that was just business as usual in the inner city. But how can it be otherwise? I’ve read there were more than 700 murders in Chicago in 2016. (746.) That’s fairly close to two a day. Now, if it was like “normal” years, those were disproportionately in the warm months, when people were out and about. No one wants to pick up the paper every day of the summer months to “Five People Murdered in Cold Blood” as the front-page headline.

We do need to know about people murdered in our airports, partly because it’s likely to affect air travel. The closer an event is to us (in location or in likelihood to affect us) and the “bigger” the event, the more we need to hear about it. It would be ridiculous to say that because I didn’t know anyone in the Towers on 9/11, it was irrelevant to me–it affected everyone in America, and it should have. But a big part of the reason many of these “events” (including that one) happen is the presence of “news.” If a man could walk into an airport and shoot several people, and no one farther than five miles away would hear of it happening, he might be less likely to do it. Some of these murders are graphic forms of performance art. And we really were not created to act as though events hundreds or thousands of miles away from us, events in which we cannot help the victim or the community, are important to our lives. Nor were we made to be on repeated “shock” for repeated negative events in our own lives. I imagine that in a day when most children don’t make it to the age of five, women didn’t go around shocked and sorrowful all the time because three children on their block have died this year–it was a sad background to life, and it grieved you when you took time to think about it, but who really has time to stop and think about it, and who wants to? It’s life, and you accept it. Now, lives taken by other human beings are many times as grievous . . . but just as many babies die through abortion as used to die of childhood illnesses, and we can and should be grieved about that, but it cannot be our “top thought” of the day, either. We can’t live in that mode.

So, yes, it was sad and tragic and yes I always hope the murderer is punished. But we cannot let any “bad news” anywhere in the world sap our joy of living the life God has given us–because each and every day there are tragic stories somewhere in the world.

Human beings are made to always find a new normal. Just like a river going through the easiest path, we will do the same. It is a blessing to be able to do so or we would all go insane. It is sad, though.

It does no one any good to sit around and constantly hear about a tragedy over and over again. We can do what we can. We can pray. Otherwise, nothing is accomplished by worrying or taking on other’s grief.

Sometimes we use concern or worry as a talisman. If we just do enough of it, (especially when it comes to our children) it will keep them safe. Scripture tells us otherwise, of course.

All of this seems strange, People talk about PTSD, Wounded Warrior’s, and such. After the violence of WW II, there were no issues about getting men adjusted to life again. My wife’s bro-in-law just came back, married and raised a family. And he probably had killed people.

I think it’s the issue of making VietNam vets villains that started this backlash against anti-military. No special appreciation was needed. As Joe said, “I just did my job.”

When we were flying, everyone was on the same time zone. That is necessary for coordination because we could be in another zone in an hour and not know it.
We always set our clocks on Greenwich Mean Time. We called it “Zebra Time” I think they say “Zulu” now. Anyhow, each aircraft, no matter where it was, had the same time.
Probably still that way.

I tried to explain something similar to a guy once. He never got it.
I told him that every plane crossing the ocean set the altimeter reading to 29.92 inches. (of mercury. (Standard sea level.) He argued that the pressure changes. OK but it doesn’t matter. Everyone has the same setting and you maintain your altitude according to that setting. It doesn’t matter what it really is as long as everyone is the same. He never got it.

I know that PTSD might seem like a recent phenomena, but it isn’t. My grandfather, who was in WWII, took anti-anxiety medication for many years. In later years, he had nightmares about the war, and once, during one of his dreams, tried to strangle my grandmother. They figured it was the long term effects of taking the medications – normally, you cannot move during dreams – and took him off them, but those dreams were about the war after decades. My great grandfather fought in WWI and was wounded, taken prisoner and held for the rest of the war. During the twenties and the thirties, especially during the Great Depression, there wasn’t much in the way of mental health care. However, we think that he did suffer from PTSD. My great grandfather is generally remembered, by those who knew him, as a good man, flawed of course, but with a good sense of humour, a Christian man who loved his family and was loved by them. He had two sons (he was the father of my maternal grandmother), the eldest of whom was the apple of his eye and who died at Anzio in WWII (I’ve mentioned him before). His younger son is still living. I interviewed him once for a writing project I was doing, to get the story of his life. There was one part, he said, he could not talk about much. Later, he told my mother the story. In my great uncle’s adolescent years, his father began to beat him, severely, for the smallest infraction. He was the only child this happened to – my grandmother, on her deathbed, told her younger brother that she had witnessed the terrible treatment but had been unable to stop it. One day, as he was beating him, my great grandfather told my great uncle that he would send him away to a reformatory. My great uncle replied that anything would be better than being treated like that. My great grandfather stopped the beating and from that day, never laid another finger on him. That is what makes his son think that his father didn’t really know what he was doing.

I saw them Phos. Interesting. I knew that it was because of the railroads, but didn’t know the details. I remember there was controversy about the time of the battle of Little Big Horn.
It was officially reported that it occurred around three p.m. Later reports from Indians said the sun was overhead. Turns out, the soldier’s clocks were set to Chicago time.

Cheryl, on your comment about women coping with the loss of children. I’m not so sure that they did. My great grandparents (on my father’s side) lost a daughter when she was 14 days old in the early 1900s. They went to the expense (and they were subsistence farmers) of having a gravestone put up for her – I took a photo of it the last time I went back to what remains of our ancestral home in Nova Scotia. My father has a family tree record going back to the mid-1700s, and repeatedly, a child is recorded as having died young and the next child of the same sex is named after the deceased child. That happened to my maternal grandfather, he was given the same name as an older brother who died in infancy. The evidence for the sorrow is there.

In West Africa, a child who was stillborn or died before they were eight days old was spoken of as having been taken back, rather than died. The statistics of 1 in 10 children dying before the age of five there didn’t include those children. After eight days, they were given a name and if they died after that, they were mourned over. The mourning there involved sending up the death wail, which was an effective signal that one had suffered loss and served to bring the community around the mourner. They did not cry. Strong emotions were dangerous – we witnessed how the spirits of their charms could take possession of them if they became overcome by emotion after a man collapsed in one of those strange inexplicable fits after witnessing his brother’s sudden death (the explanation that it was the charms that caused it came from the nationals who told us that this happens when people become too happy or sad). That did not mean they didn’t suffer though. One little girl was brought to the clinic, limp, burning with fever. Her young mother, who was nursing another child, sobbed, the tears running down her face. The national workers kept telling her not to cry, not in a comforting way but as an admonishment against socially incorrect behaviour. Lack of visible emotion does not mean there is no suffering at the death of a child. If a woman had lost many children, when a live child finally came, she would often name it something like “Garbage” or “Nobody wants it” (I knew a couple of people with such names in the tribal language) in order to hide the fact that she was so glad to have the child – doing so was a way of keeping evil spirits from the beloved child.

Another early Saturday, another bathroom work day. 🙂 I got the trash out (it’s raining) and Miguel is here to do something, I’m not sure what. But he’s busy-busy, loading stuff from his truck onto the patio.

Drywall amigo comes tomorrow morning to do something.

Real estate pal checked in 30 minutes ago, said he’s getting too old to do all this plumbing work (he volunteered, I kept saying I could call Roto-Rooter or whomever … ). But he was laughing about it today (not yesterday according to my neighbor who also knows him from when he lived on the other side of me) and it got done.

I get my hair cut (finally after 7 months, it’s way long and driving me batty) at 10 a.m. today and my friend is due here sometime in the early afternoon. Miguel may be done by then.

Gunshots can be heard here, unfortunately — they do have a distinctly different sound than the fireworks that also are common in the middle of the night at any time of year.

A month ago or so I was awaked by a very loud blast, thought it was a gunshot but turned out it was the bomb squad detonating a homemade “device” (there were 3 of them) found in a home just a few blocks away. Nice.

We never did get the full story from the police on what that was about.

We hear gunshots right before and into hunting season in the fall. People need to sight in their weapons so the shot will be true and the animal will not suffer more than a quick death. But not normally the rest of the time. Unless the coyotes are getting too pushy toward the mama cows.

We’re like you, Mumsee, when we hear gunshots in hunting season, we assume that someone’s shootin’ a deer, or a turkey, or a black bear, etc out in the swamp, I mean forest, that runs behind our family home. Out of season, if the shots are regular, someone’s doin’ a little skeet shooting. If it is one, some pesky varmit’s gettin’ his comeuppance. Now, of course, as a child, if I heard shots, I would know the drug dealers next door were rip roaring drunk again and were shooting off the back deck for fun and recreation. But they beat it out of there over two decades ago.
I have yet to hear gunshots in the city, and I have no desire to do so.

Roscuro, that’s why I specifically spoke of the number of babies who died on your block this year, and not how many you yourself had lost. I suspect a mother will always remember. But today it is a shock and a surprise if a baby dies. In an era when most babies die, we wouldn’t be coming on here, for instance, and saying “My next-door neighbor just lost her two-day-old baby, and the neighbor on the other side lost her five-day-old baby.” My younger daughter works in a nursing home every other weekend (in addition to her main job). A couple of weeks ago she came home telling of all the changes that had happened since she was last there. (I think she might have had an extra long time between shifts, I don’t recall.) One person had died, one person had been in the hospital with a stroke and was now in a wheelchair, and on and on. She didn’t say it with particular sorrow, just with wonder that so much could have changed so quickly. In a nursing home, you have residents at the end of their lives, and you expect them to be dying and their health to be getting progressively worse. Such deaths are noted in the obituaries, but they don’t make the front page of the paper. They make the “human interest” part of the paper only if there was something unique about their life. Babies dying at less than a week, in a culture where that was common, wouldn’t make the obituaries, either–they would be more like today’s miscarriages, where mothers grieve largely privately (the father may or may not feel a deep grief, but almost certainly doesn’t feel it as deeply as she does).

Now we speak of death of an infant as being an almost unbearable tragedy, and an especially surprising one. There is no way to measure whether a mother experiences the loss deeper if she assumed that babies in America in the 21st century just don’t die than if she went into it with an awareness that three of the last four babies born this month have died and her baby will probably die too. I suspect she would hold herself just a little detached from the baby she expects will die. American mothers detach so thoroughly that if “we” find out he will die soon after birth, “we” usually go ahead and kill them now.

This isn’t just philosophy to me, by the way. We had a stillborn baby within my extended family (baby of a nephew) within the last few months, and I know many women who have had multiple miscarriages (five or more), one of my former roommates had a baby die at two (serious birth defects) and so did a couple whose wedding I was in (the mother ran over the child when she was backing the van out of the garage to go take family photos including the new baby). I haven’t personally experienced such pain, but I have grieved at such losses as someone who cared about the family, or as a fellow family member.

When we hear shots from the south, we assume the gun range. When we hear shots from the north we need to decipher if it’s just the neighbour with his .22 out defending his dozens of cats or a larger caliber of a poacher in the national park (husband’s jurisdiction). If it’s a larger caliber he’ll usually go investigate.

Cheryl, one of the biggest arguments the pro-life crowd has used is that a woman’s mental health is affected by an abortion whether she acknowledges the loss or not. Emotions run far deeper than their visible expression. How a healthcare worker speaks of death doesn’t necessarily show how they feel about it. I can remember every death which I witnessed directly or indirectly both as a student and a nurse. Sometimes those memories become vivid, to the point where it almost seems as if I’m there again. I may talk in a relatively emotionless way about it, because I’m not very demonstrative of my feelings normally (I didn’t cry at my grandparents’ funerals, but I still miss them), but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t sadden me. The most fascinating part of what Jesus did when he came to Lazarus’ tomb wasn’t that Jesus wept, but that he wept even though he knew Lazarus would soon be raised from the dead. He wept because of the fact that death even existed. Death should always sadden us. “Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom” as the Psalm 90 says. It doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy ourselves because someone else has died or is suffering – in my extended family, the gathering after the funeral usually involve much laughter and there has been jokes told and songs sung around deathbeds. My dying aunt, while bone cancer ravaged her body, laughingly raised a glass at a wedding shower saying, “To life!” Her laughter is what we remember most vividly of her, though she spent nine painful years dying of cancer. In my experience, laughter and tears run close together. Like the birth of a child, what brings us the most joy frequently also brings the most sorrow. One can be deeply distressed by a report of violence done to other humans, and yet turn to smile and laugh with a loved one. It isn’t either or with joy and sorrow. I once read that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference; it is the same with joy, its opposite is not sorrow, for they can coexist as I Peter 1:6 mentions, it is despair. I remembered the Syrians suffering even as I enjoyed time with my family on Christmas. I felt no guilt for my joy as I did so, rather it deepened my concern for their sorrow.

Chas – In the midst of a documentary on the use of lobotomies, it was mentioned that the mental hospitals were full of WWII vets in the post-war years. PTSD has always been around (in WWI it was called shell shock), but not talked about as it is now.

I’ve also heard that post-traumatic stress is being recognized as a natural response to traumatic events, but often needs to be treated in some way.

I think what added to the trauma of the Vietnam vets was the hatred they faced when they came home, being called “baby killers” & such.

Have you ever seen the movie The Best Years of Our Lives (one of my favorite movies), with Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews, & Teresa Wright? It was made in 1946, & one of the characters was a former WWII fighter pilot dealing with nightmares. Another character was played by a former soldier who had lost his hands in the war. But it ended on a positive note for all the characters.

A mother’s heart always knows. A cousin miscarried her first pregnancy. She has two children now. She still mourns the loss of the first. What would have been it’s birthday and they day she lost it. Yes, many years ago it was expected to lose children, and people probably did become detached. I don’t ever want to become so unemotional that I can’t empathize with another’s loss and pain.

I was thinking of that movie too, Kizzie. One of my mom’s favorites, as I recall.

Hair chopped and feeling/looking so much better. Ahhh.

My stylist also is going through some house remodeling, she just had twin girls in the spring (their first babies after trying for a while and eventually going the route of in vitro), so they’re adding 900+ square feet to the back of their existing home. Her 13-year-old niece and mother-in-law also live in the house, so more space was definitely needed and it was easier & cheaper than finding & buying a new house that would include the kind of space & configurations they need for separate living quarters w/enough (4) bedrooms.

Still trying to get the house above forty two degrees. Good thing we have blankets and jackets. Next year, we may just get our own firewood and not pay to have it brought in. Of course, with cloud cover, the passive solar is not heating through the windows so they need to be closed again. The drapes, not the windows.

I probably saw The Best Years, I attended lots of movies in those days.
But I don’t recall it. I know there were victims of shell shock. I never encountered one. All the WW II vets I knew went back to their lives. The guy across the street joined the 52/20 club. I don’t know what he did after that.

I have some pretty new copper pipes in my bathroom (some were already copper, others were the really old ones that are now replaced).

Bought my friend a gift card for a “dinner & movie” as her belated Christmas gift to be given today. One of those years, I’m not a huge fan of gift cards but then again, we’re both getting to the age where cute “stuff” is no longer needed (unless it’s super special). She and her husband also are going through house repairs and upgrades, so I figure a night out might be most appreciated. 🙂

Oh, we don’t do copper plumbing here. Something in the water reacts in the hot water heater and creates pin hole leaks. I think it is unique to this area so I wouldn’t worry about it in California if they are still selling copper pipes.
I had breakfast with Leesee. Her mother owns several properties. One house is 40 years old and needs some updating. The were going to replace the 3 ft wide non energy efficient single pane aluminum windows with modern double pane energy efficient windows, but when they went to get the permits for the work from the City someone has decided that all bedroom windows need to be 4ft. That mean ever window would have to be widened and reframed on a brick home. About $9,000 extra, so they returned the new windows and are leaving in the old, ugly, non energy efficient windows. I understand building and safety codes but use a little common sense.

Chas, if I recall correctly, you were a teen during the war. Maybe you don’t remember some who were alive but didn’t return or who later drifted away; and, as with many other things, what someone appears to be socially may not be what they are at home. My great grandfather would have appeared entirely normal. Only his family knew of the beatings and only my great uncle knew how bad it was. My great grandfather had a friend who stayed with the family for a while who was much more shell shocked than he was, to the point of having severe mental limitations. Beside him, he would certainly have appeared normal. My father remembers a man in the village where he grew up who was shell shocked – he was something of the village idiot. The theory with mental illness is that some people are more predisposed, due to genetic makeup, to developing mental illnesses, but there needs to be a trigger to set them off. War is a trigger not only because of the fear and the violence, but for more basic physical reasons, the constant need to be alert, the permanent loss of sleep, and the concussive force of explosions. I once encountered a man who had developed schizophrenia after a head injury. Just something a simply having the force of an explosion throw you off your feet, knock your helmet loose, and banging your head against a rock might be enough to start the ball rolling. Add to that the dangerous and brutal circumstances in which that injury occurred, and your mind could be permanently warped into fear, paranoia, and an inability to tell the difference between the reality and the nightmare.

Some, if not most, of my children were diagnosed with PTSD and I believe it. The way they used to jump at noises, freeze when asked a question, anger, etc. There may be some other label, but that seems to fit. Most of them have gotten beyond that though many other issues linger. Only God can change that, but I suspect He will use it instead.

Why should the state (or town) care how how big or little one’s windows are? So it turns out some people will deal with energy inefficient windows rather than go through the headache & expense of replacing them with the “correct” sized windows.

I was fifteen when the war ended. I never knew a veteran personally, other than Joe (Argaree’s husband) There were some veterans in the Air Force.

I have energy inefficient windows. I had energy efficient windows in Hendersonville. Some of them lost their seal and had to be replaced before I sold the house.
I suspect they aren’t worth the added cost. But it makes people feel that they are saving the planet. Like ethanol.

I have a new sliding glass door and new (very large) window in the back of my house now — to replace 1970s aluminum versions put onto an addition to the house — so I am hoping they keep the back of the house cooler come summer.

I don’t mind replacing nondescript windows with new ones, but historic windows should be preserved if possible.

I mentioned the house is a 40 year old rental? It’s that funky multi-level from the 70’s. You walk in the front door to a landing, you can go upstairs to the kitchen and living room and one bedroom or downstairs to a den and the other two bedrooms.
YOU, were right to keep your windows.

Kim, yes, and it was very encouraging! And I like to think these children all have grandparents, great grands, aunts, and uncles, etc, who have been praying for them and God is using us in that whole thing.

This place is called Righteous Rides. Someone had fun coming up with that name.
Chas, I am thinking I would like to get that Find Friends app. Not sure if my children would like me following them though! 🙂

Roscuro, I definitely wasn’t saying my daughter was uncaring because she didn’t cry about the patient dying. But this was someone she hardly knew. It was a bigger deal when the man for whom she had been a caregiver, one on one, for more than a year died while she was coming on her shift. (She was present.) She cares about her patients, and even the known difficult ones like her.

I was speaking more of the fact that some deaths are more unexpected, and often as a result more traumatic. When my father-in-law dies, it will be very hard on my mother-in-law even though it won’t particularly be unexpected. But they’ve been married going on 62 years–she will miss him. At the same time, it won’t be “traumatic” in the same way as my sister’s loss of her husband unexpectedly when she still had five young children at home (15 and under). And when a person is in a nursing home and has outlived everyone they knew and loved, sometimes it isn’t sad at all. Sometimes even when the person is your parent, there is more relief than sorrow. When she already lost her physical and mental faculties and everything that made life “worth living” and was only waiting to die, and had outlived everyone around, especially if the person is in pain or doesn’t still know anyone around them, then death can feel like a relief. It is still an enemy, but an enemy that already stole pretty much everything before the very end.

I turn 50 this year. It’s astounding that I got here so quickly. But unlike most people I know my age, I lost my mother more than a decade ago, my father more than three decades ago, and every single one of my grandparents at least 60 years ago (well before I was born). Death has always been part of my life. That’s in the top two reasons to look forward to heaven, in my personal experience: no more goodbyes. No more death, no more estrangement, no more moving across the country and having friendships fade. To be with Jesus face to face is greater, and I should be theological and say that to have my sins forgiven is also greater–but the conscious biggie for me is no more goodbyes.

Jo, be sure your rental car has GPS. It doesn’t always go the best way, but it gets you there (usually). they don’t know about bridges out, detours. etc.

Find Friends is convenient. It is a mutual thing. You can find them, they can find you. If I had teenagers, I would insist on it. There was a woman at YMCA in Hendersonville who was a hiker. I told her that she should get a phone such as that. They can always know where you are. And if you have a problem, the map app can tell you exactly where you are if you need help. But GPS can do that too.
But you have to be in range of a tower. No matter your age or station in life, it is always good for someone to know where you are.

It’s been cold here all day. Ice still hangs on the trees and makes a bit of noise as the wind blows. I had forgotten that sound. I am thankful that the storm was not as bad as expected.

I heard what could have been gunshot in the night. I also heard a fast driving car go by near that time. It could have been a firecracker. I am not in the know so much about the sound differences. I imagine a shotgun sounds more like a firecracker than how a pistol sounds.

Had a good visit with my friend but I wound up not feeling well again after a while, so we ended the visit much earlier than usual. She also returns to school on Monday (she’s an LA teacher) and has been wearing a heart monitor to determine what’s causing what doctors think are just really bad panic attacks.

One of *those* years for both of us.

We did go to the plumbing supply to pick up my bathtub drain I’d ordered (she and her husband also are doing bathroom repairs and improvements so we poked around in the showroom for a while before going to dinner). After that we came back here to chat and open gifts, but she left by around 6:30 p.m. instead of our usual midnight “goodbye” time.

I think I’ll fall into bed early tonight, I’m not running a fever but just feel like I’m a little bit into a relapse, coughing, sore throat, feeling just kind of really tired.

I shared that video with my teacher friend who’s dreading her return to school on Monday.

I woke up this morning with no voice, nothing comes out. I cannot speak in either English or Spanish.

I am sick. Estoy enfermo.

I texted real estate guy who got in touch with dry wall amigo — I don’t want to spread the joy so we’ll have to suspend work on the bathroom now for a couple of days. Amigo was already at Home Depot so will drop off supplies on the patio but not work today. 😦

I am reading The Breaking Point by James Dale Davidson. He is extremely pessimistic about the economic future for America and the world. He predicts that the entire system is falling apart. Not just America but China and all the rest. He advocates buying gold and storing it outside the banking system. He is the one I quoted earlier, saying that we weren’t a Kleptocracy but a Pimpocracy. That is the situation in which the ruling class was not, themselves, crooks, but benefited by giving access to them. This essentially describes the Clinton Foundation. (But not only them.) I tried to find some quotes to illustrate his arguments. This is the one that closest describes it.

“The national debt soared from $5.800 trillion in 2000 to $13.561 trillion in 2010- a jump of 133 percent. You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to recognize the system is flirting with collapse when the burden of national debt compounds 3,000 percent faster than the productive economy grows. And this is without consideration of the multi-trillion dollar increase in unfunded liabilities for future spending programs such as Social Security and Medicare.”

Davidson thinks we have passed the point where anyone can fix it.
I recommend the book with the warning that it can be extremely tedious at times, plowing through stuff that does not elucidate.

It would be more fun to go on a bear hunt. Remember that fun children’s book? I do not want to go on a frozen pipe hunt. Art went to the office after church. It’s me and the pipes. I think the problem is with the downstairs bathroom which does not get much use except it houses Miss Bosley’ s litter box.

I sympathize with the gist of the parody. I didn’t feel like I had a long enough break. However, it would take an enormous storm, probably involving plenty of ice rain, to shut down the university. City buses drive in all weathers here, and so it will depend on whether the professors can make it to class. Judging from my college experiences, it will probably not happen. Just as well, since the schedule for the semester is packed with work.

Do you have a crawl space under the house, Janice? You could put a space heater under there and that should work. Or, possibly in the bathroom with the cabinet doors open. Or crawl under and wrap things in heat tape. Or use a heat gun carefully if it is PVC.

Interesting to see God working. As you know, both fifteen year olds were in tough places. Last night’s bedtime Bible story for ten year old was Ezra reading the Scripture to the people, the people crying in remorse. Ten year old said, too bad they did not have the New Testament. Which lead to discussion on remorse and forgiveness and the power of the Blood. Last night, before heading off to bed, fifteen year old daughter apologized for her recent behavior, received forgiveness and was immediately back on track. This morning, fifteen year old son remained sullen and whatever. He spent an hour punching his solid wood bunk bed. Came out and rinsed his hand for a while. Sat pathetically in the chair. And last night’s conversation came up again with the small folk. He heard of course. Shortly after, “Mom, I am sorry for….” and we move on. Life is good with God.

Yes, leaving the faucets at just a trickle can help on those few really cold days you have. We actually had several cities whose officials recommended that one year. We do not have to do that, although, I would never say never.

Be careful with heat tape or whatever you do. We always hear of fires starting that way.

We don’t think too much about hearing gun shots, unless it is very dark outside. Then we wonder what someone could be shooting at.

Just read something someone shared on Facebook that says that Jesus’ reference to eunuchs (some born that way, some made) was a reference to homosexuals, & that they were made that way by God.

What might you say to this? Not that I am necessarily going to enter that conversation, but for my own further understanding, & if I am ever confronted with it in the future. (Sometimes I wish I’d paid more attention to those long discussions on the subject on the old WMB, or even copied some of that stuff for future reference.)

Karen @ 3:51
The word “eunuch” is used only once in the NT outside the part concerning the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts.
It has nothing at all to do with sexual orientation.
It is a practice in which men are castrated before they reach puberty. It is almost certain that Daniel and his friends had this procedure. They had one purpose in life: to serve their master. Daniel and his friend profited immensely by this, but I can’t say they would have preferred it. OTOH, they knew nothing else.
This has occurred throughout history.
Much more could be said about this. But that’s the main point.
A eunuch would not be a homosexual. He would be “unisexual”.

I just had a plumber know on my door at 8 am. Donna, did you send him? Actually I had called but no one said when. So I will return after the staff meeting. My sink has had water under it and so needs a new gasket. Those things do tend to rot.

The author was referring to Jesus’ reference to some being born that way. I would assume what that meant was male babies born with something wrong with their genitalia, but those who want to find homosexuality confirmed in the Bible say He was talking about homosexuals, maybe using “eunuch” like a euphemism. (Of course, if it was fine & dandy with Him, He wouldn’t have used a euphemism for it.)

And speaking of Daniel, I have read the claim that he was homosexual. 😦

Just heard a broadcast yesterday asking about eunuchs. I always understood the word to be used for those who were castrated to be used for the purpose of watching over the harem. The speaker did mention the use of the word for these men used for whatever the government wanted. However, the speaker said that by the time of Daniel the term was used for various government officials and not for those necessarily castrated. He did not think Daniel was, but I forget why he said that.

I assumed the part of some being made that way by nature would be those who do not desire sexual relations. Paul says God made him satisfied not to be married. There are people who also have no desire to marry or have a sexual relationship with anyone.

Kizzie, as Chas said, a eunuch is a castrated man. Generally, such operations were done before puberty, which was much less dangerous because the body had not yet become dependent on the sex hormones; the occasions when such a castration was done after puberty were often for humiliation and punishment – the sad story of Peter Abelard, a brilliant medieval scholar, is a case in point: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Peter-Abelard.

I have noticed some modern confounding of the word ‘eunuch’ with an effeminate homosexual. This confusion may have come from the terrible fact that all too frequently, castrated boys were used sexually by older men. When children were kidnapped by Barbary pirates from the coasts of Europe, blond boys were especially prized in the Turkish slave markets. I’ll leave you to infer why. There is a long and dark history of pederasty within the harems of the Middle and Far East, and even in Southern Europe, especially among the Greeks and Romans. The Emperor Nero is reported by two Roman historians to have used a eunuch in that way. However, eunuchs were not castrated primarily for that purpose.

If you notice in the book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar made a habit of collecting royal children from all the kingdoms he conquered. To be served by the sterilized children of royal bloodlines was an expression of ultimate power, and an ultimate humiliation to the conquered nations. Eunuchs, as related in the book of Esther, were used as servants and guards in harems, because they were physically unable to father children and thus could be trusted among the king’s women. Nehemiah was also most likely a eunuch, since the king’s cupbearer could not be a man with any ambition, and the easiest way to remove ambition was to render them unable to father an heir. Indeed, Nehemiah seems to feel the fact that he is a eunuch keenly – under the Mosaic law, a eunuch could not enter the congregation of Israel and Nehemiah, more than once in his account, pleads with God to remember him for good. Castratos were eunuchs that were singers with unusual voice ranges; they were used first in the Byzantine empire and later in the Papal choir and in Baroque opera [Italy, as the place of the great merchant cities that traded with eastern empires, acquired a lot of cultural influences from the Byzantines and later the Turks] – the last known castrato died in 1922. Like Daniel, eunuchs were used as high government officials, such as ministers and in confidential bureaucratic positions. The Byzantines had an entire civil service made up of eunuchs. I read a book called Arabian Sands, written by an Englishman who traveled in the Arabian peninsula in 1948-49. He speaks of meeting an emir (an officer of high rank), who was a eunuch slave from Africa. It is highly probable that in countries such as Mauritania, where slavery is still active, that there are also eunuchs among the slaves.

So, the very recent usage of eunuch as homosexual portrays only a small part of the history of that term, and is an insult to the many eunuchs who served in respected and high offices – some of the eunuchs in Chinese history were close in rank to the emperor. Eunuchs disappear into history and are remembered only in records because they had no descendants to remember them, but while many were slaves, some of them chose their profession knowing that castration would be a part of the job requirements (this might seem unbelievable, since most castrations were done before puberty, but recall that twelve years olds in England and the Americas were made apprentices – a child of twelve was, for much of history, considered ready to enter the world of adults). Christ, in his remark, was actually giving hope to those such as Nehemiah. In making it, he also held out hope to those who are born transsex (a rare defect where the genitals do not match the sex chromosomes) and to those who have been castrated for any reason (sadly, with cancers such as testicular or penile cancer or certain injuries, castration is necessary to save a man’s life). None of them are beyond the kingdom of God, as they were excluded from the nation of Israel.

Don’t worry, I am not going to comment on that. I just wanted some more info for myself, & for if I am ever asked directly about that.

For instance, & probably primarily, I expect that when Chickadee comes to Jesus, she will have questions & confused ideas from what YF has put in her head, & I want to have some idea of what to say. (It was YF who shared that article.)

Kizzie, it’s good to have answers to what people ask (if they aren’t just asking questions to change the subject), but there probably is no way of knowing what your girls’ focus will be if and when they come to Christ someday. I would suspect political / moral arguments would become peripheral, but whatever you might have “prepared” to answer them will likely be irrelevant and you will likely have forgotten much of what you researched. I think in this, focusing on secondary issues long in advance of when / if they will ever be called upon is distracting your own heart and mind. If they come to Christ, they will want to know what God says, but I have a hunch that modern arguments on things will look like just as much dross to them as they do to you.

It comes to mind the counsel given to some of the apostles who were about to face questions from persecutors about their faith: not to study in advance what to say, but to know that God would give them the right words at the right time. I am not saying don’t study Scripture, but don’t make your focus answering some hypothetical questions on some future day. Continue to study the Word for yourself, and as for your girls, pray but let God work out the details of what they need to know.

I know I can’t have every answer to every question that might come up, but when I see something like that article, I want a better understanding myself. If the question comes up, I may have some idea of how to answer, & if it never does, I have still learned something interesting anyway.

No, I was discussing air bags with eighteen year old son. He is still trying to get his BMW back together, piece by piece since his sister wrecked it. He is learning quite a bit about the differences in BMW manufacture from a lot of other types. He had the airbag out and we were guessing how it worked. My guess was a gas and his was electric pulse. Google told us that it was an electric pulse into some chemicals that made a gas when sparked.